Purple Foods boost Immune System

“Eat something on the spectrum of purple every day your general health will be better.”

1. Get enough quality sleep

• How much you need varies for each individual. The national average is between 7 and 8 hours.
• Valerian is good for promoting good sleep.
• If having problems getting to sleep watch your chocolate and caffeine intake. If you are switching to de-caf make sure that it is organic. (The chemical that they use to take the caffeine out with is carcinogenic)
• If you are waking up in the night you are low in magnesium. Pumpkin seeds are spectacular.

2. Eat a rainbow a day

• Eating a wide variety of different coloured fruit and vegetables which each are rich in different compounds will enhance immune function. More fruit and veg and the bowel function tends to enhance. You are what you absorb and fail to eliminate.

3. Eat something dark purple every day

• Eat something on the spectrum of purple every day and your general health will be better.
Your risk of cataracts will be lower, your Eye-Sight better, your risk of bowel cancer lower you’re your vascular condition better. • Consider beetroot, pomegranate, cherry, prune, blackberries and blueberries. Prunes are 3 times stronger than blueberries but less than half the price (They do not have an aggressive effect on the bowel. This was a marketing myth from the 2nd world war.)

4. Limit your sugar intake

• Sugars compromises the immune system.
• 75g of glucose/ 100 g of any other type of sugar will halve the activity of immune system for next 4-5 hours. So you have just eaten a decent bar of chocolate, bowl of ice-cream, you meet a friend with a cold or flu, you have doubled your chance of getting it.
• Fruit juices aren’t that clever because they are fairly concentrated sugars.

5. Get vitamin D

• Sunlight is ideal.
• But one food you can get function vitamin D is from mushrooms grown in sunlight.
• Consider shitake mushrooms (tastes wonderful). British mushrooms are also good for the innate immune system – they contain compound beta – glucans. (Naturally buried in yeast in mushrooms.)
• Beta –glucans at a level of 2-3 milligrams per kilo weight lowers the risk of chest infections in hard-training athletes. And if you have to go to hospital for any reason, lowers the risk of a hospital viral infection by about 60%. It is not going to make you bullet proof but does seriously strengthen your immune system so that you can deal with infection better. If you get an active infection, double the dose. Even evidence that keep you healthier while under-going chemo or radiotherapy.
Beta glucans are a phenomenol compound that really do make a difference to your immune function. So much so, that they are added to formula milk in Scandinavian countries to give to infants, claim same advantage of breast milk.

6. Stay happy

• When you are happy and in good shape then your immune system is in good shape. When you are down and depressed your immune system is not doing so well.

7. Eat fermented foods

• Miso, Kimsheee, Sour krout. They are easy to make – so make the ones that you like.
• Or take a supplement.

8. Get enough iron

• It is the compounds – the folic acid, the vitamin c, the bi-flavenoids, the b12 that help you absorb the iron.
• If you are eating lots of fruit and vegetables, the co-factors for getting iron in the body are there. So if you are low in iron figure out why you are losing it. if worried about iron stores, look at your tea and coffee intake, with coffee being bad, tea being worse. Coffee knocks out 60% of your iron. Tea as much as 70-80% and that include Green Tea.(Tanens that do it, not the caffeine).